An Evening with Ocean Vuong in conversation with Kei Miller

Writer, professor, and photographer Ocean Vuong is the author of On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, winner of the American Book Award, The Mark Twain Award, and The New England Book Award. The novel debuted for six weeks on The New York Times bestseller list and has since sold more than two million copies in 41 languages. He is also the author of The Emperor of Gladness, an Oprah Book Club selection and finalist for the Dublin Literary Award. A nominee for the National Book Award and a recipient of a MacArthur "Genius" Grant, his books of poems include Time is a Mother, a finalist for the Griffin prize, and Night Sky with Exit Wounds, a New York Times Top 10 Book, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Whiting Award, the Thom Gunn Award.

Selected by Time magazine as one of its 100 Rising Cultural Influencers, Vuong's writings have been featured in The Atlantic, Granta, Harpers, The Nation, New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Paris Review, The Village Voice, and American Poetry Review, which awarded him the Stanley Kunitz Prize for Younger Poets.

Born in Saigon, Vietnam and raised in Hartford, Connecticut in a working class family of nail salon and factory laborers, he was educated at nearby Manchester Community College before transferring to Pace University to study International Marketing. Without completing his first term, he dropped out and enrolled at Brooklyn College, where he graduated with a BA in Nineteenth Century American Literature. He subsequently received his MFA in Poetry from NYU. In 2026, he will serve as a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University.

He currently splits his time between Western Massachusetts and New York City, where he serves as a Professor in Modern Poetry and Poetics in the MFA Program at NYU.

Kei Miller is the author of 11 books that range across genres – fiction, nonfiction and poetry. He is interested both in that movement between genres and between creative writing and literary scholarship. In 2014 he won the Forward Prize for Poetry for The Cartographer Tries to Map A Way To Zion. His Novel Augustown won the Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. His collection of essays, Things I Have Withheld was shortlisted for the Bailley Gifford Prize. He has also written several essays of literary scholarship in the field of Caribbean Literature.

Kei joined the English Faculty at UM in 2021. He previously taught in the UK at the Universities of Exeter, London, and Glasgow. Kei has an MA in Creative Writing from Manchester Metropolitan University and a PhD in English Literature from the University of Glasgow. His dissertation examined the epistolary tradition in West Indian Literature.